Original news and analysis on international IP policy
World Intellectual Property Organization members this week took early steps toward the possibility of a treaty to facilitate the registration of industrial designs, and urged WIPO to continue addressing potential new challenges to trademarks from the impending expansion of domain names on the internet.
Influential copyright scholar Larry Lessig yesterday issued a call for the World Intellectual Property Organization to lead an overhaul of the copyright system which he says does not and never will make sense in the digital environment.
"Instead of re-hashing old debates about patents, patients and profits, forward-looking pharmaceutical executives should consider new ways of ensuring that medicines reach all patients who need them," writes John Erickson, one of the researchers who discovered the HIV medicine recently licensed by the National Institutes of Health to the Medicines Patent Pool.
A first proposal on the future mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is on the agenda this week at the ongoing 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. A proposal prepared by the Group of 77 and China opts for another five-year mandate for the IGF to discuss internet public policy related issues and embraces the so-called multi-stakeholder principle.
In a police-secured, airless room full of Geneva journalists, Julian Assange, creator and director of Wikileaks, today gave details of what he described as United States abuse of human rights in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as an alleged muzzling of US press on those subjects. The United States will undergo its first Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council tomorrow.
With the Republican Party taking control of the United States House of Representatives in yesterday's election, some changes are expected in intellectual property policymaking, according to observers.
Disagreement over the mandate of a newly-formed World Intellectual Property Organization committee resulted in a vote to suspend the meeting with no conclusions last Friday evening.
Most businesspeople and generalists understand that social media can be an important but risky part of doing business. This article seeks to identify how to spot potential intellectual property law issues associated with social media websites and content that can arise for a company.
With a standing ovation in the early hours of the morning of Saturday, in Nagoya, Japan, an international instrument aimed at preventing misappropriation of genetic resources was adopted by members of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The protocol is also intended to ensure that benefits accrued from the use of those genetic resources are shared equitably with the provider country.
A substantive review of a rarely-used amendment to the World Trade Organization intellectual property rules and enforcement trends that may threaten multilateral trade system topped the agenda this week in the Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
European proponents of geographical indications have granted an award to a Hawaiian coffee lacking GI protection as a sign of solidarity with the producers, they said. Europe is a prominent actor in this type of intellectual property right on products linked to a specific regions, and the French government along with a GI lobby group last week held an informational event geared towards Africa.
Today the negotiating group on a protocol aimed at stopping biopiracy and rewarding countries providing genetic resources had to admit, hours from the end of the high-level meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), that it has not reached an agreement on the draft text. The president of the convention gave them one more deadline of midnight in Nagoya, Japan, before ministers gather for the last time tomorrow.